Monthly Archives: April 2006
Herald Nix
This guy’s art & music will amaze you! I had the opportunity to stay in the Heritage Home he had been refurbishing in Salmon Arm some years back. I had the chance to see his painted boards in his studio space, one at a time under nice light. I was able to hear him play guitar out on his back deck in the evening time.
“One hundred years from now, when musicologists attempt to trace the origins of British Columbia’s lake-country blues, there’s one salient moment they’ll be able to point to: the day Herald Nix, loaded his battered amplifier, his equally well-worn guitars, and a few dusty suits into the back of his old panel truck and headed east from Vancouver, back to Salmon Arm.
Nix was already almost a legend then, a shadowy figure noted for thrillingly intense concerts, sudden disappearances, and a handful of fitfully brilliant recordings. Now he vanished again, into the center of B.C.’s lush yet sun-baked Interior, whose rounded curves and rocky promontories have since seeped into his music , joining trace elements of Son House and Mississippi Fred McDowell, Hank Williams and the Jimmie Rodgers.
The sound and the land, the land and the sound: inseparable now, they bring strength and dignity to Nix’s music in a way that, in the English-speaking world, is rarely found outside of the southern United States. Like Bob Dylan and Richard Manuel and very few other Northerners, Nix has become an honest bluesman, his lake-country sound a Canadian parallel to the hill-country music of the Mississippi Delta.
The comparison is not at all far-fetched. Like the hill country’s late champions Junior Kimbrough and R.L. Burnside, Nix can hammer on a single chord all day while still holding the listener’s attention with subtle inflections of tone and timing. Like them, he’ll rework a song according to how he feels, and these themes grow in emotional impact every time they’re recorded. And like them he writes obsessively about women , about moving on, about hotel fires and bad decisions, liquor drunk and money gambled away.
But he’s no copyist, and no revivalist. That lake-country water is in his veins, keeping him true to himself and to the land where he was raised. He’s on the road from being a Canadian eccentric to being a Canadian pioneer, on the cusp of inventing a new musical idiom. The lake-country blues start here, but who knows how or when they’ll end?”
— Alexander Varty
Sarah Harmer at Knox
When the days close on the memories that you’ve acquired
And your body cannot hold your soul inspired
You are here and not alone
Everybody has come home
There’s a bed made up upstairs
If you get tired
All the heaviness around you will get light
And your worry lifted up into the night
Left with nothing but pure love
Left with all you are made of
Can I stay around awhile
Is that all right?
Oh lives don’t end
Goin’ out to be brought back again
Our lives don’t end
Chapel Time: Day Thirty-One
Bedtime Poem: I Love This!
SHADOW
Jane Urquhart
From: The Little Flowers of Madame de Montespan, The Porcupine’s Quill, Inc., 1995. pp.10-11
The sun decides to
enter from the garden
moving on the carpet
he touches all your furniture
crawls under your closet door
investigates your wardrobe
moves his arm across
your memories
substituting light
heat and silence
he erases last year’s
conversations with the stars
changes the contents of your mirrors
invents an alternative
palette for your crystal
scrapes his nails across brocade
revealing tangled threads
like contours on a map
he polished your tables
his brilliance clings to cutlery
till spoons become large
bright incisions
all across the grain
a weight of gold and heat
he stops burning
at the flesh of your neck
you are the only shadow in the room.
Chapel Time: Day Thirty
But now thus says the Lord,
he who created you, O Jacob,
he who formed you, O Israel:
Do not fear, for I have redeemed you;
I have called you by name, you are mine.
When you pass through the waters, I will be with you;
and through the rivers, they shall not overwhelm you;
when you walk through fire you shall not be burned,
and the flame shall not consume you.
For I am the Lord your God,
the Holy One of Israel, your Savior
Chapel Time: Day Twenty-Nine
Chapel Time: Day Twenty-Eight
Chapel Time: Day Twenty-Seven
Shotokan
Shotokan
Shotokan was founded by Gichin Funakoshi (1896-1957) in Tokyo in 1938. Funakoshi is considered to be the founder of modern day karate. Born in Okinawa, he began to study karate with Yasutsune Azato, one of Okinawa’s greatest experts in the art. In the earliest stages the martial art was known simply as "Te" or "Tode" which mean "hand". The Chinese character used to write Tode could also be pronounced "Kara" and the name Te was replaced with Karate-Jutsu or "Chinese hand art". This was later changed to Karate-do by Gichin Funakoshi who adopted an alternative meaning for the Chinese character for "Kara", "Empty". From this point on the term Karate came to mean "Empty Hand" The Do in Karate-Do means "way" or "path", and underscores the moral and spiritual elements of the discipline and philosophy of Karate.
In 1921, Funakoshi first introduced Karate to Tokyo. In 1936, at nearly 70 years of age, he opened his own training hall. The dojo was named Shotokan after the pen name he used when he signed the poems that he wrote in his youth. Shotokan Karate is characterized by powerful linear techniques and deep strong stances.
There are 26 Kata in Shotokan (15 basic and 11 advanced). All have "bunkai" or actual applications for all movements in them. They all start and end at the same place on the floor (embusen).